Louisville Fire's ambulance service earns prestigious recognition

Margaret Payne, a firefighter EMT with the Louisville Fire Department Station #1 trains firefighters Tim Heine, left and Brian Waselko in equipment and medical procedures inside an ambulance at Station #2 on Thursday morning.
(
Paul Aiken
)

LOUISVILLE -- Until recently, there were just three emergency response agencies in Colorado with the prestigious "gold standard of excellence" from the Commission on Accreditation of Ambulance Services. With the Louisville Fire Department joining that elite group earlier this month, make it four.

Chief Tim Parker said the exhaustive, year-long process to getting CAAS' nod of approval -- which included completely opening up the department's books and making available employees to speak with evaluators -- was "tough" but worth it. The areas CAAS assessed included Louisville Fire's training practices, fleet maintenance, billing systems, quality assurance and response times.

"Accreditation is the only way to measure your system against what the industry expects," Parker said. "The process didn't allow us to just pick and choose what we wanted -- it required us to meet national standards."

CAAS, an independent Glenview, Ill.-based organization, was formed 20 years ago to establish a comprehensive series of standards for the ambulance service industry.

Louisville Fire Deputy Chief Michael Schick said the evaluators who visited Louisville for two days in March dug deep into department records and ran its protocols through the wringer. They checked to see which personnel had proper and up-to-date certification and whether leadership from the department's medical director was effective. They even tried to determine if Louisville Fire monitored the temperature of medicines on board its two ambulances. (It does.)

"We promised best-in-class service for our citizens and this is an objective way to measure that," he said. "We can demonstrate that we've exceeded expectations as a transport agency and an emergency medical services provider."

Schick said Louisville exceeds the national standard for response time, executing 90 percent or more calls of service in 7 1/2 minutes or less. The national standard is responding to 90 percent or more calls within eight minutes.

The accreditation is all the more impressive when you consider the size of the Louisville Fire Department -- with 16 career employees and around 80 volunteers -- and the fact that it was contracting out its ambulance service to an outside company as recently as five years ago, said Scott Vivier, the EMS chief for the Henderson, Nev. fire department and one of the site reviewers who visited Louisville.

"For a small department, it was clear they had invested the time and effort into this," Vivier said. "They had a fantastic program and there were no deficiencies. They were in full compliance with all the standards."

Louisville Fire Department responds to nearly 1,600 calls a year, with 800 to 900 of those being ambulance calls.

Dr. Richard Henderson, Vivier's colleague in the evaluation of Louisville's ambulance service, said the quality of the department's medical records and level of medical care were "among the best I've ever seen in all my visits."

"It shows real commitment by the leadership and real buy-in by the rank and file," he said. "It's a top-notch organization that we were very impressed with."

According to Carl Wangman, accreditation process manager for CAAS, out of 15,000 licensed ambulance agencies in the United States, only 160 of them have earned CAAS accreditation. He said it's "quite remarkable" that a small operation like the Louisville Fire Department was able to do so.

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